24 Hours at the Edinburgh Fringe

By Tara Isabella Burton

There are arts festivals, and then there is the Edinburgh Fringe. Gleefully chaotic, gargantuan in scale, and intensely gripping, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival runs for three weeks each August. Since 1947, the festival has been transforming Scotland’s ancient capital into the worldwide center of culture, as nearly every arts professional in the UK (and a good proportion worldwide) decamps north for the summer. The city’s population quadruples in size as actors, comics, musicians, journalists, and ordinary paying punters descend upon the labyrinthine streets of Edinburgh’s Old Town. Cafes, pop-up cocktail bars, and vintage clothing shops, overflow onto the street as stalls selling jewelry and antique silver are swarmed by stage managers desperate for last-minute props.

To some embittered locals, the Fringe Festival is a grudgingly suffered necessity: a boost to the city’s economy at the expense of its peace and quiet. But to the rest of us, the Fringe is more than simply a chance to see a show or two, it’s an opportunity to live in a world – however temporarily – in which the strange, the surreal, and the experimental, become mainstream. A world in which buskers from Lesotho advertise a concert played entirely on “found instruments” salvaged from the trash-heap, in which clowns on the Royal Mile vie with the world’s official “Most Tattooed Woman” for attention from passersby.

I’ve seen more of the Fringe than most. Reviewer for Broadway Baby by day, performer by night (my piece of immersive theatre, Midnight at the Rue Morgue: the Madness of Edgar Allan Poe, runs nightly at 22:40 at SpaceCabaret, a decadently dilapidated cabaret bar just moments from the Royal Mile), I’ve experienced the Fringe from both sides of the audience/actor divide. While no day at the Fringe can ever be considered “typical”, a twenty-four hour snapshot of life here might reveal more about the frenetic Fringe culture than any more anodyne description could do:

9:00 am: No rest for the weary. No sooner does the alarm go off than I make my way from my sublet to the flat shared by most members of my cast, crossing the Meadows and passing a fleet of buskers playing the Toreador theme from Carmen on a musical saw. Like most rented flats in Edinburgh during this period, it has far more inhabitants than beds: our actors have spread out over the living room floor, their sleeping bags strewn between wayward props and the many hundreds of play flyers we’ve already accrued. We rehearse a new scene for Midnight at the Rue Morgue in the living room.

11:00 am: It’s an old saying that “anybody who’s anybody” is at the Fringe Festival, and it’s far from off the mark. After learning that a filmmaker friend from my former home city of Tbilisi, Georgia, is in town making a documentary on Georgian theatre, I invite him out for a coffee and a late brunch. During the meal we “swap flyers” – the equivalent of a handshake in Edinburgh parlance. We talk about potential future projects and make arrangements to see one another’s shows.

2:00 pm: It’s time for my first scheduled review of the day. At the Fringe, show slots start at about 10 in the morning and finish around midnight. I make my way to the Royal India Buildings off George IV Bridge. The Royal India Buildings are an ornately decorated suite of nineteenth-century rooms converted for the Festival into “C Nova,” which is known for small-scale and often experimental productions. I, along with about four other visitors, am here to see Echolalia, a one-woman clown show about Asperger’s Syndrome. Such small audience numbers are hardly uncommon – rumor has it that the Fringe average is three – and most of the shows I see during my time in Edinburgh have fewer than ten in the audience. Nonetheless, the show is excellent and I mark five stars down in my notebook, secretly pleased to be the first to “discover” a Fringe highlight in this unobtrusive black box theatre. (Later, I learn, the show has blossomed into a full-on Fringe success, with audience numbers to boot).

4:00 pm: Small audience numbers may be common on the Fringe circuit, but they’re hardly good for the bottom line. Producing a Fringe show costs at least £2,000 (equivalent to roughly $4,000), sometimes significantly more, and the work of “shifting tickets” is often more onerous than actually performing. I, along with the rest of my cast, head to the Royal Mile: the nexus of all Fringe-related activities. Nearly every show bases its actors here to hand out flyers for the duration of the run, each show adopting a different gimmick to draw the crowd’s attention. On the way to our pitch I spot an enormous dragon puppet, a triad of squabbling campers in a tent, the cast of Fawlty Towers, and a duo of stone-still actors in full Regency dress (they’re advertising Mansfield Park). We spend the next hour flyering in costumes inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s characters, trying our best to steer away the numerous small children who toddle over with their families to collect a flyer from “the nice clown.” Better not to let them know that the clown in question is a serial killer inspired by Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart.

7:00 pm: It’s back to reviewing as I head to another venue for a show that differs wildly from this morning’s piece. The performance in question is a piece of new writing inspired by the conflict in Sierra Leone. As grim and harrowing as Echolalia was light and fantastical, A Concrete Jungle Full of Wild Cars is certainly flawed – it’s a young playwright’s debut – but it’s all the more compelling because of it. After all, Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett debuted some of their early work at the Fringe, and it’s thrilling to think that writer Mariana Ives-Moiba might one day follow in their footsteps.

9:00 pm: Back to the Royal Mile for another bout of flyering. Because our venue is only steps from the Mile, our late-night flyering doubles as a warm-up session, with our drama games and exercises attracting crowds eager to “get in” on the act (one spectator starts to warm up with us). We recite Poe’s The Raven to a group of fifty passersby; they applaud fervently and ask for flyers. One American man even offers us money – albeit twenty pence. “You’re actors,” he says. “Don’t you all need money?”

10:40 pm: It’s show time. Our play is interactive and immersive, with the audience encouraged to wander about the space, follow characters that interest them, and rifle through props in order to look for clues to the stories being told. Such an approach has proved successful at the Fringe, where experimental theatre tends to be popular and audience members frequently respond well to the challenge. Tonight, though, one audience member is more responsive than usual. Edgar Allan Poe himself – a refugee from another Edinburgh play called Dead Famous – has turned up in character, and he proceeds to follow us around the set, reciting his famous lines along with the actors.

11:30 pm: After the show, we ask Poe to stay behind for a photograph with the excited cast. He agrees, but refuses to break character throughout, even when the anxious technical team tries to nudge us out of the space – we’re the last show of the night, and they want to go home. Our sound technician tries to figure out what on earth Poe is doing at our show. “It’s the Fringe,” he concedes at last, throwing up his hands in mock-despair.

12:30 am: We’ve cleared the stage of props and head back to the cast flat, still in costume, to deposit the tools of our trade.  Afterwards I head back to my own sublet. Even at this hour the Meadows are full of people – buskers, lovers, and casts sharing a midnight cider on the lawns. I am tempted to stop for a while, to sit on the grass and look at the stars. I reconsider. I’ve got an early start tomorrow.

 
Tara Isabella Burton’s essays, reviews, and travel writing can be found at Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Statesman, Salon, Guernica, The Rumpus, Condé Nast Traveller, and many other places. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Arc, Shimmer, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, and more. She is the winner of The Spectator’s 2012 Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for travel writing and the author of the novel, A Thief in the Night, currently on submission. She is currently a Clarendon Scholar at Trinity College, Oxford, working on a doctorate in theology and fin de siecle French literature.